"As computerized systems become larger, more complex and increasingly distributed, there is a growing need for formal methods that guarantee their reliability, correctness and efficiency," Vardi said. The Rice team will address this challenge by developing specifications and validation methodologies based on games, automata and logic.

Vienna Awaits McMahan

As part of the "Games and Automata for Synthesis and Validation" project's training program, graduate student Ben McMahan, a member of Vardi's Computer Aided Verification and Reasoning Group, will conduct research for two months in summer 2002 at the Vienna University of Technology under the direction of Georg Gottlob.

While in Austria, McMahan hopes to interact with the people there about their research, and continue his project that looks at the relationship between conjunctive-query containment in database systems and constraint satisfaction in artificial intelligence.